This caught us off guard too when suddenly the "New Confluence Experience" (WTF are they a Disney ride now??) appeared upon login.

I immediately advised our user base to 'opt out' but as of Aug 24 we are going to be stuck with the clunky, ugly and infuriating "New Confluence Experience". I've opened a feedback issue but we're probably screwed. (It's like all the gnashing of teeth when the markup was deprecated - but at least that had technical justification and useful vestiges were left).

At least for our mission sites supporting operational activities are self-hosted so we won't be upgrading those for the next few years. We have customized sidebars that rely on having the page tree the default view.

The 'New Confluence Experience' claims to clean things up with the contextual menus, but the dynamic behavior confuses users and the new icons, fonts and line spacing is clunky and wastes huge amount of space.

Bottom line: sidebars and menus should be complete configurable by site admin with the 'legacy' and the 'new experience' provided as the out-of-the-box options.

We are indeed aware of this pain some customers are experiencing with the page tree not being there on Overview pages.

Because we are listening, we have decided to extend the period customers can opt in and out of the new experience and we will only be bringing customers back into the new experience by default (with no option to opt out) in mid September.

I hope this helps adjust, meanwhile we are taking the time to respond and act on this feedback , and will improve the experience between now and then based on this.

Because "useful" is going away, it's going to be removed from the code, so it can't be permanent.

Hopefully, it won't go anywhere until "painful" has been brought up to scratch. My opinion is that "painful" needs a lot of work as it feels like it's a design that's passed the automated unit tests but not real user tests.

If the UI callback functionality is hardcode dependent on the UI layout then it's a lousy implementation!!

There should be no reason why the menu bar and side bar locations, content, icons, fonts, layout and hide/show defaults should be completely configurable, irrespective of the functionality that they invoke.

I am very happy to see that other Confluence users share my frustration about the new UI. There are many aspects to it, but the new page tree is the worst part of something that looks nice, but is terrible to use.

May main pain points:

The new page tree takes significantly more time to load. (Atlassian made some improvements here recently, but still.)

It is not instantly visible when you open a space, you have to click the «Pages» icon first, and even then it does not appear in the sidebar, but on the right hand side.

When I find a page through full text search, quite often the page tree does not unfold, so I don't see the position of that page in the page hierarchy.

The new design is less compact, so you have less information on the same screen, and this is also true for the number of page tree entries you can see at once.

You can not manually rearrange the page order in the page tree anymore.

I just learned that the opt-out option will go away soon and that we will be forced to use the new UI soon. This will be the day when I'll start evaluating an alternative to Confluence Cloud.

Martin I actually replied to an email thread we have open, but just for the benefit of others- regarding the issues you mentioned -

The new page tree takes significantly more time to load. (Atlassian made some improvements here recently, but still.)<----- We are working on improvements to the page tree. The new navigation still offers times better performance and page loads than the old , and so overall the experience performance wise is better. Nevertheless, this complaint does not go unnoticed.

It is not instantly visible when you open a space, you have to click the «Pages» icon first, and even then it does not appear in the sidebar, but on the right hand side.<---- Once you are on 'Pages' in a specific space, it will always then remember that this was your last top item visited and take you there next time you go to that space. So, the extra click to get to 'Pages' should be saved on subsequent visits to the space. Is this not happening for you?

When I find a page through full text search, quite often the page tree does not unfold, so I don't see the position of that page in the page hierarchy.<--- I've logged this as a bug. Looks like its happening but only on some edge cases, we are adding it to our current sprint.

You can not manually rearrange the page order in the page tree anymore.<---- There actually is a more prominent Reorder Pages button than before now that allows you to reorder pages. It exists when you click on "Pages" in your space and its in the top right .

Thanks for your feedback. Let me quickly reply to some of these points:

As I said, there were improvements in the last days and I really appreciate these. On the other hand, I can not confirm that «the new navigation still offers times better performance and page loads than the old» – my experience so far was just the other way round.

Yes, once you have clicked on «Pages» in a specific space this is the default next time you open that space. But then the space home page is not visible anymore and you have to click again to bring it back. Having the page tree on the left and the home page on the right was simply perfect. It's the same principle like on any webpage: Present the home page plus a navigation at the same time. Why hide either of them?

But now that I am thinking about it I am not sure that it was ever possible do reorder pages directly in the page tree. And maybe it's not a good idea anyway, because people could rearrange pages accidentially while browsing.

you said :"Once you are on 'Pages' in a specific space, it will always then remember that this was your last top item visited and take you there next time you go to that space. So, the extra click to get to 'Pages' should be saved on subsequent visits to the space. Is this not happening for you?"

I'm sorry to tell you this does not work for anonymous users (all our customers accessing our documentation) and the search button that should show me the latest visited pages gives no history. So now the sidebar cannot be customized and the space shortcuts are not displayed anymore in all pages, it's a pain to get back to a parent space. I have to try to add these options in the space header which is not even displayed anymore in the overview page and I don't talk about the display issues I'm facing with the use of section/column in the header. As I already said bugs are acceptable, removal of useful functions is not.

thanks for taking a look at the anonymous user angle. When I talk a bout a parent space, I mean the space where our anonymous users and landing that contains our knowledge base and the links to all spaces where our documentation is located (so "child spaces"): there's one space per product/version.

So when you look at a product documentation inside another space and wants to get back to the landing space, it's now much more complicated, there's nothing in the history and I'd say it's not intuitive to click on a search button to look at the history, I don't think any will do this. Several clicks are then necessary. If I add space shortcuts this will mean they will have to get back from the page they are to the space overview page (they will not think about this and this is of course more clicks). That's why it is at least necessary to give us the option to display the space shortcuts from any page, even if this will add more work because adding a space shortcut is not the same as adding an include macro in the sidebar that points to a common page where I can define all the necessary links I want. Now with this design, instead of updating one common page, I have to update each documentation space, one by one. Worst, I've just been informed the include macro won't work anymore in the header and footer, adding more administration work (I tried to add a shortcut there to the landing space as a workaround)

This means that when clicking on the Confluence logo on the top left in the blue sidebar, your users will always get to the same page you choose (you basically select a space to be your site home, and we take the overview from that space and display it there always for people to land back into).

the landing page is defined for all users, including anonymous ones. I have a landing page that points to a portal space where registered users can select to go to our intranet while anonymous users can click on the Knowledge Base and documentation space, plus a link for our partners.

This requires more clicks than a simple link to the documentation space as there's a portal space between.

Moreover, maybe you are not aware of this but the landing space settings has no effect for Confluence-Only users (bug reported). If you click on the Confluence logo or the company logo I've added, you are not sure to go to the homesite page, I mean the "overview" page. It seems there's a cookie placed, even if you're not logged in, that gets you back to the latest page you saw which can be "Activity" or "Spaces" so no more "menu" driven page for them and they cannot "opt out for now", no option for anonymous users (all our customers).

Hi Stéphane - you are quite correct! That horizontal scroll should not be there. It is in fact a bug that we're working to resolve right now. Thank you for raising this issue - a fix should be out shortly.

As far as scroll bars go, I'm having a lot of trouble trying to get the vertical scroll bar in the second side bar (not sure what it's called but it's the grey area) to work. Is seems hard to get it at exactly the right spot where it will work. Is it me? Is it just because it's Friday? ;-)

I used to customize by sidebar such that long page titles wrapped. This negated the need for a sidebar at all... I also fixed the sidebar so it was always there... No clicking 'Pages' to find that you're in the wrong location for the page tree to appear and you go to a different Pages view...

As for switching spaces - we are on it and will provide an easy way for you to do this in the new design too.

Search - is still the same number of clicks just like before. I realise visually this is a big change and takes time getting used to, I'd love to know what you think of it in 2-3 weeks time of using it? Please let me know.

Page tree is still available whenever you view a page if you expand your sidebar. I understand some people need/want it also on overview page. There are many many use cases of it disturbing and taking focus away from the overview page, for some types of spaces.

I assure you we are considering all these use cases and will continue to listen to customers and improve on this. Your voices are being heard. None of this will be ignored.

What use is the page tree available when you view a page if you're on a Space and can't find a page to view because the page tree is missing. Seems a bit like a circular argument.

I'm sure there are some use cases where the page tree might have been distracting on Space pages, so make it configurable, optional. Don't just take stuff away. From the huge outcry I hope you are seeing that there are many,many of us that 100% depend on that page tree visible when a Space is selected.

Please, please give us back the Page tree. I can work around some of this other stuff and adjust to the new design, but this is a complete show stopper on my server instance.

Liron - if the page is "disturbing and taking focus away from the overview page" then tell users to minimise the side bar.

Don't take it away for these "many many use cases", when there are clearly "many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many use cases" where it IS useful (as evidenced by the flood of negative comments here).

This feels like one of those cases where a single whale wanted something and Atlassian implemented it because the single whale is a lot more valuable to them than a shoal of small fish.

...and even the 'aesthetics' are questionable. I find the 'new' look UI visually unbalanced and clunky.

I do really wonder where the requirements and design for this came from. Most of the comments here and in the related threads and issue point out how central to the user experience the pagetree and configurable sidebar is to many customers.

Speaking of "missing features returned", I've asked for the ability to customise the sidebar to be returned. In the newlook Confluence we've now got links for "Blog" and "Gliffy Diagram" in the sidebar which confuse our users because a) we don't have a blog so it takes them to an almost empty page, and b) they don't need to know/want to know what a Gliffy Diagram is - they just need to see the resulting diagram on the page.

Much as I'm an Atlassian fan-boy, I have to say this change has failed me as well.

There are parts of it I like, many I'm not bothered about, and one that really jumps out as a terrible design. I normally think in pictures or monospaced orange and black text, 25 by 40, so I don't usually feel qualified to talk about user interfaces a lot.

But I want my side-bar back. I'm perfectly fine with a show/hide option, and hiding it when in edit, search or admin where it might not be useful.

But any time I am reading a Space, I want a consistent sidebar with space shortcuts and a static, explorable page tree that tells you where you are and doesn't change the context all the time.

I've also been a fan-boy and have championed/admin'ed Confluence/JIRA in our organization. This kind of upheaval makes it harder to 'sell', as it's a constant battle to get some of the team to use. Making it more confusing to navigate just turns off the skeptics even more.

Ditto. The sidebar is an ESSENTIAL element... It was bad enough when the last design change happened and the sidebar became restricted, full of features I don't want or need. I'm still reeling from that!

Ditto on the 'sell to the business' thing. We're trying to get everybody to use this as the go-to-point-of-truth and buy-in is not easy, especially since we have a very diversely populated business. The latest changes make me feel like a hypocrite when I try to point out the features of Confluence that make it so useful and overall loveable.

The only thing that I can say with a straight face is to paraphrase Winston Churchill. "Worst product, except for all the others."

Quick, obvious access to effective Search is one of the most important features and advantages to an integrated, hypermedia environment. It is always the first thing I tell neophyte users to rely on.

The loss of the single-click easy to use search box that is always available and immediately obvious at the top of the page is a totally regressive change.

I forsee a lot of work creating custom navigation pages and page templates with search and pagetree on them so our user base doesn't get confused. In other words, recreating what Atlassian has taken away or made hard to find.

@Martin Sauter not to disregard your point – just thought I'd mention you can press the " / " key to jump straight to the search both in the old and new design if you weren't already aware. Hope it helps :)

I'd also like to voice my displeasure. The left nav is used as our primary form of navigation. Making that non-configurable adds unnecessary clicks to the experience (no page tree), and adds features that are not used (Blog). Please make this area configurable again. In a Wiki, Function >>>> Form.

Agreed. As I've noted elsewhere, I NEED the sidebar and I NEED it to be customizable. My users really really struggle with finding information in Confluence—we have tens of spaces and anything that helps with navigation is essential. I have a complex navigation which works like the contents of a book. I need to add sections dividers without actual content, like the blank page of a book that marks the next 'part'.

Leave the #$%ing Tree alone - it was FINE. Its our primary navigation tool - enter the space, hit the tree, navigate = Done! Now we are stuck with new age hippie UX bullshit that requires clicking our dumb arse around the UI just to get to the Tree. We pay thousands for this system, specifically cause it has a kick-arse Tree - why are we being asked to wear this UX #$%-up?

I love the way Atlassian asks for comments on the Confluence interface "update", and every time you opt out and go back to the old one, they ask for reasons, even asking if the can contact you w.r.t. your comment.

And then they ignore user input. "Take their money, ignore their requests" seems to be the way some successful software companies are going when they get a large enough user-base.

User experience has no place when all that matters is simplistic code-reuse and getting code out the door ASAP.

I tried to opt out and found all the bugs and issues I have now with the new interface were gone... but I had to get back to the new "cool and amaaaaazing" interface because all our customers who access our documentation are anonymous users and then cannot opt out so I need to find solutions.

I really like Confluence, I use it very often and I ask my team to use it as much as they can. I can accept bugs, it's hard to accept several bugs but it is not acceptable to have features we had that are now removed. I really have other things to do than spending my time finding workarounds to the features I used and that were very helpful.

Hey Bruce, not sure why this is the feeling, we in the team read through thousands of bad and good comments every single day coming from the product, and we do contact many customers who give feedback and allow us to contact them, in order to understand more of the context.

If you would like to set up a session with us for a 30 minute interview, please let me know. I would love to sit with you and understand the pains youre experiencing in the product with the new experience in more detail.

Hi Bruce and thanks for your post and the links. We are indeed aware of this pain some customers are experiencing with the page tree not being there on Overview pages.

Because we are listening, we have decided to extend the period customers can opt in and out of the new experience and we will only be bringing customers back into the new experience by default (with no option to opt out) in mid September.

Taking this time means two things:

1) More time for you to adjust and learn the new experience, train your team, etc.

2) More time for us to address issues exactly like the one you mentioned. We are working through this and trying to find the right balance of solutions with you - our customers - at top of mind.

I apologize if the feeling has been that you have been ignored. The team (me included) are working through improving the experience every single day and are reading through everything including the above tickets you mentioned. Your voices are not unheard, even if not every single request is fullfilled. We are taking this time to respond and ACT on your feedback, I will soon give an update about what exactly it is we are improving/bringing back etc.

please explain me how anonymous users can "opt out". This new shiny UI has broken many things in our online documentation. I need an option as an admin to "opt out" either the whole instance or some spaces. This will let us time to find workarounds to the features you've removed in this new concept of "regression software".

So mid-September... That gives us two/three weeks... when I say 'us' I mean me—a part-time worker, the only person responsible for 600+ pages worth of customer-facing documentation. Now, that's not Atlassian's fault at all but figuring out a way to make things as usable as possible, on top of a more than full-time job... Not gonna happen.

The last time Atlassian made big changes to the sidebar (adding in the weird child page/page tree option instead of a simple list of all the pages in the space) it took ages to work out a way around it (customized page include). And now that fix has broken... I'm running out of options!

I rely HEAVILY on the page tree - well, more the sidebar as I'd customized the page tree such that it worked for us. I need to COMPLETELY design my customer-facing product documentation space so that users can find pages...

Why does Confluence do this, simply take away MAJOR features? Is there any way to get prior notification of these changes?!

I tried to add in the latest email exchange I had with Atlassian regarding the issue I opened about the UI.

Excerpt:

"...This is valuable feedback and I have forwarded this issue to my manager, the dev team behind the new look as well as the Product Manager, so rest assure that your feedback is being heard, as well as any other feedback throughout all our channels (Community, public bug tracker, Tweeter, etc).

This change isn't just about the looks, the dev team really believe that in the long run, after our customers get used to the new layout, our customers will get more tasks done and faster, this is our main goal with the change..."

My response was basically, why does the dev team believe users will get 'more tasks done and faster'?

It is evident from this heated thread that the dev team has missed many critical use cases, worse, they've broken existing use cases that many users depend on and have invested a huge amount of knowledge capture using, often over many years (as we have).

This has caused a problem for me... I used to just change the space key to jump from the same page in my dev space to my public space. Instead, I now have to remove the page id and change from 'spaces' to 'display'. One tiny edit to three.

I emailed about this and they told me it was part of a bigger change... this change I guess.

For a short while I could click on the page title to get the simpler URL, but yesterday that disappeared too.

I've long known that this is the wrong tool for our public facing documentation and this is yet another leap away from what I need...

The way I use Confluence is to have two almost identical spaces—one internal, one public. I make changes in the internal one during product development and when the product I'm documenting is released I copy my changes (using a CLI tool) to the public space. I often need to compare the two pages in the different spaces. I used to simply change the space key in the URL to go from one space to the other. Now I need to change space name, 'spaces' --> 'display' and remove the page ID. I imagine that soon enough the old URLs will not work and I'll have to drill down through the (hidden!) page tree to locate the pages in their different spaces. Seems minor but when dealing with tens of pages—day in, day out—the time adds up!

(This is a simplified version. I have more than two spaces in reality - staging and pilot spaces, for example.)

(Sorry for the multiple messages! I was getting a 'spam' message when sending. I couldn't figure out what the problem was so split up the message into chunks! For future reference it didn't like the links.)

"the dev team really believe that in the long run, after our customers get used to the new layout, our customers will get more tasks done and faster"

A couple of questions here:

1. Why in the hell are the dev team making design decisions this enormous? Why aren't product managers and designers making the decisions?

2. No-one gives a damn what they "really believe". Can you show us some hard evidence that your "customers will get more tasks done and faster" like, oh, I don't know, USER RESEARCH?

This is NOT like the ribbon on Office products, which was based on about 18 months of heavy duty user research with thousands of people. This is a small bunch of people thinking that the way they work is the way everyone works, or in other words, a perfect example of why dev teams in a grown-up company aren't entrusted with this kind of decision.

"the dev team really believe that in the long run, after our customers get used to the new layout, our customers will get more tasks done and faster"

The new UI has been implemented in mid August if I well remember so this is quite a long run and my users and myself are still complaining about how it is complicated to find options that were available easily before this new "shiny" UI has been implemented. And now we have the new editor experience... with new bugs, new ugly and small icons and hidden options... because the Atlassian product managers and developers think all users should know the keyboard shortcuts... (facepalm)

Most users don't give a rat's ass about keyboard shortcuts. Neither, to be honest, do I (a developer), who uses only one shortcut, and that's 'E' for edit. ONE!

I have come from thinking that Confluence is one of the best tools for corporate wiki and even simple documentation use, to one who has actively UNrecommended it to two people contributing to purchasing decisions, who were interested in my opinion.

The arrogance of those who are responsible for these changes exceeds just anything I've experienced in decades of software development and use. Even Microsoft's.

Atlassian has to make some serious decisions about whose opinion matters. That would be either the clients and their requirements, likes, dislikes and 'user' needs (novel idea, is it?) or the (and obviously totally clueless) ivory tower notions of corporate managers, who don't give a $%$*^ about clients, but only about their own and their immediate group-think groups' ideas about what should be.

Another issue. In the (largely hidden) page tree, to see a long page name, you need to expand the side bar or click to open the page to see the full title. It used to be that the page name would fit (to a certain length—the new font is bigger) or hovering over the name revealed the full title.

I have users who HATE the new UI. These are very tech-savvy users and not just people afraid of change...

If I was to peruse the list of voted features in JAC, pretty sure there wasn't anything voted up like "remove page tree from sidebar because it slows things down"

Please stop changing the UI every release and concentrate on the issues that are sitting with 500+ votes. That's what your user community wants, not to learn ANOTHER UI that some designers and developers dreamt up in an obvious bubble.

Please leverage the involved community to participate in proposed drastic UI changes early on and not after you have released them.

Please stop concentrating on "Pretty" instead of "Functional".

Susan (AUG Leader, AUG Council Member, QUAD Committee Council Member, Atlassian User for 9 years and who was completely blindsided by this new UI).

Your new interface sucks. I'm sure you are chalking all these comments upto the price of integration across platforms and whiners. But it sucks. I need spaces as they were, as others have already commented. And really - too much trouble to leave a search box? A universally understood idea that any user can find? Brilliant idea - move it under an icon and then clutter it up with 'recent times' and 'recent spaces'. What a cluster-suck.

STRONGLY 2nd David's comment about how bad moving the search box and button is for our user base.

The first thing I tell neophyte users is that they can always find anything on the entire site by just starting to type into the search box and if needed using the search button - and that those can always be seen on the menu bar and directly accessible.

If you're going to change the design can we at least have a menu like feature so that we can arrange our spaces like an actual website. This will help our users navigate around better rather then going to the space directory.

I voted for all the tickets aksing for the page tree back the way it was, or at least an opt-out of the new design. Just adding me too here as well. Page tree open and visible by default is vital to our work and our use of the product. New display is a hindrance and not an improvement at all. Please give us some option.

It should be possible to have 'opt out' users just keep running on the current, stable Confluence Cloud codebase and let all thems that wants enter the Brave New World and debug it as Atlassian forges on their continuous dev-ops path...

We currently don't have the cycles to adapt our site to the new "features" and find workarounds for the site structure that the new Confluence experience breaks.

As it seems in the long term we'll have to live with the changes, I'll work with it in coming weeks and months to see how to mangle it to our needs, but I don't want to disturb/perturn/frustrate our users while doing that.

As you may have noticed, the date for switching all users to the new UI has been postponed. The announcement in the top bar of my Confluence Cloud instance now reads as follows:

«We're giving you more time to prep for the new Confluence experience while we act on your feedback. We'll be turning it back on between Sept 14–23. Opt back in or learn more.»

This is good news for everybody following this discussion. By this Atlassian acknowledges that a significant part of their users/clients are not satisfied with the new Confluence experience. And it leaves a bit more time to discuss issues and hopefully fix them.

On the other hand, Atlassian still plans to switch all users to the new UI, even if they have opted out. I think this is one of the main reasons why the discussion here and elsewhere on Atlassian Community became quite heated.

The best thing Atlassian can do now is to accept that there are users who find the new UI useful and users who don't. Instead of vasting a lot of energy for argueing with frustrated users Atlassian should simply let them choose between the old UI and the new UI as long as they wish. There can be a Confluence Classic Theme and a Confluence Modern Theme side by side – no big deal for Atlassian, but a massive relieve for people who use Confluence differently than the Atlassian UI team assumes.

So I am asking Atlassian: Don't enforce the new UI on us – convince us that it's the better alternative! Leave us the choice between the old and the new theme, contuinue to improve the new theme – and time (and statistics) will show.

By the way: I would like to thank @Liron Deutsch for participating in this discussion. While we don't agree in many points regarding the new UI I really appreciate that she is taking her time to explain the reasoning behind it and to forward our complaints to the developers.

I can log out, but what I'm left with is unfortunately unstable and at times unusable Screenshots below taken from the same browser on different days. I'm not only unable to view pages correctly, but also sometimes unable to save pages when editing due to missing links.